iWorld
Reliance Communications comprehensive loses amount to Rs 2,068 crore in Q3
MUMBAI: Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom.), once a dominant force in the Indian telecom sector, continues its painful spiral into financial oblivion. The latest Q3 FY25 results make for grim reading, with deepening losses, shrinking revenues, and an insolvency process that looks more like a never-ending courtroom drama. The company, under corporate insolvency resolution since 2019, posted a staggering net loss of Rs 2,068 crore for the quarter ending 31 December 2024, further extending its financial nightmare.
But is there a miracle in sight? Or is RCom. doomed to be a cautionary tale in corporate history?
Standalone Results
RCom.’s revenue from operations in Q3 FY25 stood at Rs 65 crore, marginally slipping from Rs 66 crore in the previous quarter. Compared to Rs 71 crore in the same period last year, the company seems to be on a never-ending treadmill-moving, but going nowhere. The nine-month revenue isn’t offering much comfort either, standing at Rs 206 crore, a dip from Rs 220 crore in FY24. With operations at a standstill and no meaningful revenue streams, RCom.’s survival depends on asset monetisation. However, that process has been moving at the pace of a turtle on vacation.
Consolidated Results
RCom.’s financials for Q3 reveal a disaster unfolding in slow motion. If numbers could scream, these would be deafening.
RCom.’s profit after tax (PAT) might as well be renamed loss after tax, as it posted a net loss of Rs 2323 crore for Q3 and a whopping Rs 6779 crore for the nine-month period. The losses are on autopilot, and there’s no emergency landing in sight. The EBITDA situation? Let’s just say it stands for “Empty Bucket DA”. There’s no sign of improvement, and the company continues to hemorrhage cash.
Revenue from operations came in at Rs 87 crore for Q3, which, in telecom terms, is barely enough to keep the call centers running. The nine-month revenue stands at Rs 272 crore, proving that RCom.’s once-mighty earnings have taken a permanent vacation.
If you’re an RCom. shareholder, consider looking away. The earnings per share (EPS) before exceptional items was (Rs 8.67) per share for Q3 and (Rs 25.10) per share for the nine-month period. After exceptional items? Let’s not even go there.
To top it all off, the comprehensive loss for Q3 stood at Rs 2,373 crore, ballooning to Rs 6,878 crore for the nine-month period-because apparently, one kind of loss just wasn’t enough.
The financial report reads less like a balance sheet and more like a horror novel. With no operational revenue and a debt mountain that refuses to shrink, the road ahead is looking rockier than ever.
Discontinued Operations
RCom.’s discontinued operations, including its wireless spectrum, towers, fibre, and media convergence nodes, continue to be the financial equivalent of quicksand. Despite being classified as “held for sale” since 2018, these assets remain unsold, haunting the company’s balance sheet like a ghost that refuses to be exorcised.
The real horror story lies in the discontinued operations segment, where the company booked a massive provision of Rs 1,840 crore towards license and spectrum fees, sending the total net loss soaring to Rs 2,068 crore. For the nine-month period, RCom.’s total losses ballooned to Rs 6,012 crore, with discontinued operations contributing Rs 5,874 crore in losses. If you’re looking for signs of improvement, well, there aren’t any-the loss for the same period last year was Rs 6,232 crore.
The segment’s revenue was a pathetic Rs 3 crore, against expenses of Rs 160 crore, leading to a Rs 156 crore loss. Making matters worse, the company has not accounted for interest on loans amounting to Rs 1,327 crore for Q3, further distorting its actual financial position.
Debt and Insolvency
RCom.’s financial position is about as stable as a house of cards in a hurricane. The company has defaulted on both interest and principal payments for years. Its total debts now exceed total assets, with a debt-to-assets ratio of 1.02. Net worth? Completely wiped out, standing at a shocking negative Rs 68,490 crore as of December 31, 2024.
The insolvency resolution process remains stuck in legal limbo, with creditors desperately waiting for some sort of recovery. But with Supreme Court and NCLT hearings stretching on indefinitely, they might be waiting for a long, long time.
Segment-wise performance
. Telecom services: With just Rs 65 crore in revenue, the core business has all but collapsed. The segment continues to operate at a loss, and there’s no revival plan in sight.
. Infrastructure and enterprise solutions: This segment is in hibernation mode, waiting for the insolvency proceedings to play out.
. Discontinued operations: The spectrum, towers, and fibre assets remain stranded, with no buyers in sight, making them a financial black hole.
With no revenue growth, no operational revival, and mounting liabilities, RCom.’s future looks about as promising as a sinking ship without a lifeboat. The resolution process remains entangled in legal battles, and the much-needed asset sales haven’t made any progress. Creditors are frustrated, and shareholders have zero hope of recovery.
Unless a miraculous acquisition or restructuring deal materialises, RCom. is likely to become a footnote in India’s corporate history-a grim reminder of how unchecked expansion, debt mismanagement, and regulatory battles can sink even the biggest players.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
